1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image pickup module manufacturing method and an image pickup module manufacturing device.
2. Description of the Related Art
A small and thin image pickup module is mounted on a portable electronic device such as a mobile phone having an imaging function. The image pickup module has a structure in which a lens unit in which an imaging lens is assembled is integrated with an image pickup element unit in which an image pickup element, such as a CCD image sensor or a CMOS image sensor, is assembled.
As the image pickup module, there are an image pickup module that includes an auto-focus (AF) mechanism for adjusting the focus by moving a lens of a lens unit, and an image pickup module that includes an optical image blur correction mechanism for optically correcting the blurring of an image to be picked up by moving a lens unit and an image pickup element unit relative to each other in a direction orthogonal to an optical axis.
For example, JP2010-21985A and JP2009-3152A disclose image pickup modules including AF mechanisms, and JP2013-97375A and JP2012-37549A disclose image pickup modules that include AF mechanisms and optical image blur correction mechanism.
In recent years, an image pickup element, which has a large number of pixels equal to or larger than 3 to 10 million, has been widely used in an image pickup module.
When an image pickup element having a small number of pixels is used, particularly high accuracy is not required for the alignment between a lens unit and an image pickup element unit. However, when an image pickup element having a large number of pixels is used, alignment with high accuracy is needed.
JP2010-21985A discloses a technique that automatically aligns a lens unit with an image pickup element unit and automatically fixes the image pickup element unit to the lens unit.
In this technique, an image of a measurement chart is picked up by the image pickup element while the image pickup element unit is moved in a direction of an optical axis after the lens unit and the image pickup element unit are set to initial positions; and the positions of the lens unit and the image pickup element unit are adjusted from the obtained image. After the positions of the lens unit and the image pickup element unit are adjusted, the lens unit and the image pickup element unit are fixed to each other by adhesion.